In honour of Black History Month, we’re featuring some of the Black artists whose work is in the Paintings in Hospitals collection. Yinka Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004. His screenprint 'Thank You' was kindly donated to Paintings in Hospitals last year...

Jealous Gallery kindly donated Thank You by Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare CBE to us last year, as part of The HELP Portfolio.

Shonibare works in a diverse range of art media including painting, photography, sculpture, dance, movement, and film. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism, and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Brightly coloured, batik-inspired wax prints called Ankara fabrics, feature heavily in his art.

Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004. The nomination was for his Double Dutch exhibition at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and for his solo show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Shonibare’s work was also included in the 1997 travelling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.

His works have made reference to paintings by earlier artists, among them Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco Goya, and Leonardo da Vinci. He also based his work Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) on the narrative works of British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764).

Born in London in 1962, from the age of three, he lived in Lagos, Nigeria. He returned to London to study at Goldsmiths, University of London and Central St Martins.

Because he has a physical disability that paralyses one side of his body, Shonibare uses assistants to make works under his direction.

Thank You is a 9-colour screenprint with gold leaf and varnish overlays. This work was kindly donated to Paintings in Hospitals by Jealous Gallery as part of a larger donation of The HELP Portfolio.

The HELP Portfolio was conceived and developed during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns by artist Sue Arrowsmith, collector Christian Mathews, Jealous Gallery and Print Studio director Dario Illari, and Cristea Roberts Gallery director David Cleaton-Roberts. The idea was to allow established artists to support charities that had been hit hard by the effect of the coronavirus pandemic. Sixteen artists, including Shonibare, generously donated a print to the portfolio. Sales of the portfolio directly benefit sixteen charities (including Paintings in Hospitals) personally selected by each of the contributing artists.

Yinka Shonibare, Thank You, 2020. Part of the Paintings in Hospitals collection.